This invention relates generally to the fields of speech synthesis and wireless communications.
Various voice-user interfaces are known in the art including voice to text applications such as Nuance Dragon Naturally Speaking. Similarly, various text to voice applications are known in the art. For example, the Apple iOS operating system includes a voice-based application known as Siri which has both voice to text and text to speech functionality.
SMS text messaging, instant messaging (IM), electronic mail, and other text message applications are well known in the field of telecommunications. Such applications use standardized communications protocols to allow personal computers and/or mobile handsets to exchange short text messages. Applications for converting text messages to speech, such as Google Text-to-Speech, are known in the art. Known text to speech applications employ synthetic voices to verbalize the content of the text message. Such applications may permit a range of voices as to the preferred synthetic voice, however such voices are not typically customizable to a particular human being.
The present invention permits a text to speech application to use a recorded sampling of the sender's voice to customize the speech output such that it is rendered in the sender's voice.